Happy Halloween!

Googley eye invasion

The students in after school seriously love googley eyes. It started with a group of 5th grade girls making these little creatures...

But it soon evolved into boys and girls of all ages rushing to the art cabinet to pillage for eyes, then grabbing at glue guns and attaching eyes to various random objects from the "useful junk" shelf. In addition to the puff-ball creatures that started it all, the students have made plastic bottles with eyes, toilet paper rolls with eyes, glass jars with eyes, and on and on.

Seriously, we can't buy enough googley eyes.
I've been thinking about how exciting it seems to be for the kids to anthropomorphise regular objects by adding these eyes - even trash is suddenly precious when it can look back at you. What is it about adding eyes that is so powerful to these kids? Is it particular to this group of kids? Or is there something in all of us that wants to humanize our surroundings?

It's giving me lots of ideas for future, larger scale projects...

Recyceled Paper Banner Project

I made this banner for the After School Room and then helped a bunch of kiddos make their own. Lots of kids spelled their names, a group of girls spelled out the name of a play they were working on, and one spelled out "Ice Cream!". Love it.

Texture mobile

A sensory activity with some of my kiddos - we used air-dry clay and pressed it into different found textures (a favorite texture: the bottoms of your shoes!).

Art camp round up

Art camp was such a success!

(Giant  potato-printed poster)

(Paper mache ladybug)

(Tissue paper picture frames)

(Salt dough creatures)

...and there was so much more! It was a great week.

Linking us together - the giant paper chain project

It goes on and on... So many people have added their own links! A metaphor for the many individuals who are so strongly connected here at CPSC...

No parking on this muffin!

We had a cooking adventure this afternoon at CPSFC, making cornbread muffins and silly decorations. After all the measuring and mixing and pouring, we put them in the oven to cook, and worked on making some mini flags to go on top. You can see that some of the kids were pretty territorial over their muffins:

"DO NOT EAT IT!"

 "nooooo parking!" (at penalty of pirate takeover)

Finger puppets!

The older kids made some fabulous finger puppets today!

Painting cheeks

Here are a few photos I took at the Durham Earth Day festival at Central Park with my partner, Eli. We saw a lot of kids we knew from CPSFC and Schoolhouse of Wonder (where Eli is the Program Director) and painted well over a hundred faces! We were pretty tired afterwards.

...and this tiny screech owl was right behind us:

 Also, I ate a hot dog from a food truck, which I have to seriously not recommend.

Mini dot journals

I spent some quality time with the paper cutter making a stack of pre-cut "pages" for this project in After School.  I showed the kids how to use pencil erasers as a "dot" stamps, and they created beautiful journal covers on cardstock, which we then assembled into little handmade books...